Engineer, Musician, Photographer

Facebook type image rotation and more using PHP and Javascript

If you are a facebook geek like me, you must have noticed till now the image rotate functionality in the photo albums. Facebook allows you to rotate images 90 degree clockwise and anti-clockwise after image upload. If you haven’t tried that till now, below is a screenshot for your convenience.

Question:
But the question is how does facebook team succeed doing this in one click. Today I tried looking around for a solution over internet and I came across the inbuilt imagerotate functionality in PHP.

Problem:
Unfortunately the problem is that even if you have GD Library extension enabled in PHP, imagerotate function just doesn’t work. After some research I found that to enable imagerotate function inside PHP, you need to compile and build PHP manually and enable imagerotate while installing PHP. You can check your PHP installation support for imagerotate using the following command line:

php -r "var_dump(function_exists('imagerotate'));"

Solution:
Since I didn’t want to touch my current installation of PHP, ImageMagick came to my rescue. Below I will show you how did I achieve cloning facebook’s 90 degree rotation functionality and also added a custom degree rotation (functionality usually seen in collage tools).